Yunhui-ege (Moonlit Winter)

The snow in the Hokkaido town of Otaru builds up in dunes, covering sidewalks and cars. One of the main character’s aunt describes what it means to live with it through winter: you shovel it, it builds up again, you shovel it again. Life is the constant process of excavating a pathway, again and again, until winter passes. It’s a powerful symbol in Dae Hyung Lim’s film about buried feelings, about two lives derailed early and tragically by societal pressure. 
Yoon-he (Kim Hee-ae) lives in Korea with her teenage daughter Sae-bom (Kim So-hye). She is recently divorced from her husband and her daughter is about to graduate high school and attend university in Seoul, so this is a turning point in her life, an expected emptiness that may hold the potential for change. Jun (Yûko Nakamura) has been living in Japan since her own parents divorced and is sharing her life with her aunt. They seem to have built a comfortable routine around her work as a veterinarian and the running of a cosy cafe in town. Both women have built a life away from each other but they are also living in an arrested state of suspense, as if their lives since their forced separation has evolved in ways that they didn’t get to choose. Jun writes a letter, it reaches Yoon-he’s daughter, who decides to take her mother for a holiday in Otaru to learn more about her. 

Moonlit Winter could have been a film about rekindled feelings, with flashbacks of what Jun and Yoon-he shared in the past: instead the profoundness of their connection is made clear in how it has left them adrift in their present, clear in Yoon-he’s loneliness and unhappiness, her isolation and inability to communicate her feelings to her daughter, who is desperate to know her, and in Jun’s unwillingness to consider a new relationship (reacting with almost violent frustration at the suggestion of marriage, turning down a potential suitor by insisting that she too keep her private feelings to herself, in case she is met with same societal condemnation she once was) with someone else after all these years. It’s more about how their interrupted love has affected their personal relationships with other people in the present, especially between Yoon-hee and her daughter, who perceives her mother’s loneliness and unhappiness but doesn’t know why they are so profound. Sae-bom, an aspiring photographer, is trying to get to know her mother through this trip into the past, and there is a beautiful symmetry to the idea that what originally caused her to be so remote, distant, unreachable could now be the reason for a new intimacy and closeness found in having a better understanding of one another. 

The actual reunion, bittersweet and tender, happens late in the film, and feels like a catalyst, like a circle closing so that the characters can finally live lives closer to what they were meant to have, without the outside pressure and the damage of non-acceptance. It’s not the ending you might expect from a film about two past lovers reconnecting but it resonates deeply regardless. 

2019, directed by Dae Hyung Lim, starring Kim Hee-ae, Yûko Nakamura, Kim So-hye, Sung Yoo-bin, Hana Kino.